Farmer-dominated pattern land consolidation to solve arable land fragmentation and its effectiveness evaluation in Guangxi

With socio-economic growth, arable land fragmentation has increasingly become a serious obstacle to agricultural development, in terms of waste of scarce land resource, need of intensive labor input, obstruction of application of machineries, increasing production cost and reducing land use efficiency. Land consolidation has widely been taken as a necessary approach for solving this problem. In the context of rural revitalization, it is of great significance to explore novel patterns of land consolidation besides traditional government-dominated pattern. The objective of this paper was to expound on the mechanism and examine the effectiveness of a new land consolidation pattern, namely the farmer-dominated pattern of "merging small plots to large plot", emerging in the rural area of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in hope of making contributions to innovations on land consolidation, rural land reform, and rural revitalization. Methods of semi-structured interviews, quantitative models, and case studies were adopted. This new pattern combined a BOTTOM-UP process of land tenure adjustment, land consolidation plan, design and engineering, spontaneously carried out by farmers, with a TOP-DOWN financial support from government, which was conditional on meeting the requirements of high-standard basic farmland construction. Before "merging small plots to large plot", land fragmentation affected agricultural output, production cost and land use efficiency by directly or indirectly acting on input factors of land, labor, capital, technology among others in arable land use system. While "merging small plots to large plot" could reallocate land parcels and readjust land tenure, enhance the coordination and mutual adaption of various input factors, hence promote the alignment of productive forces and relations of production. In the case study of Nongnong Village, farmer-dominated land consolidation pattern increased the area of arable land through filling earth ditches and merging field ridge, dramatically reduced plot number through merging small plots, significantly improved arable land use efficiency and agricultural productivity through infrastructure construction such as roads and irrigation facilities and agricultural machineries application. Furthermore, this new pattern substantially increased farmers' income through adjustment of cropping structure and transfer of rural labor into non-farm employments. It was concluded that farmer-dominated land consolidation pattern was a typical model of the BOTTOM-UP land consolidation by the farmers combined with the TOP-DOWN supervision and support by government, could effectively solve the problem of arable land fragmentation and promote optimization and coordination among various input factors of arable land use system, and proved itself as an effective approach to bridge the gap between smallholders and modern agriculture characterized of industrialization and mechanization, which could contribute to rural revitalization and be extended to other regions in China as well as other developing countries. Three insights are suggested to extend this innovation pattern. First, central and provincial governments should issue policies to address the legitimacy problem concerning farmers self-organized land merger and consolidation and to provide financial supports for construction of farmland infrastructures. Second, village elites should play an important role as facilitators, coordinators, or brokers in whole process. Third, a special work team on site, comprised of village cadres, village elites, representatives of all clans and interest groups, should be assembled to deal with conflicts of interests and ensure the synergy of multiple interests and objectives.